The Hike on Mt. Wilson

 The Hike on Mt. Wilson

               

Almost exactly five months ago today, on May 5, 2008 (today being the milestone date of November 4^th), I went on a hike with Sycamore and Molly, and a large group of co-workers and friends of co-workers from her workplace, the Natural Resources Defense Council, a.k.a. NRDC, a.k.a. Nerdic.  Some of these people included Erin and Nathaniel whom I considered two amongst my very few friends in Los Angeles, Bart, an outdoor enthusiast and trailblazer, Jessica, a co-worker at NRDC who was very cute and who I would meet out one night a couple months later and not recognize, and Margaret, another co-worker at NRDC who I briefly had a crush on after first meeting her in late 2007 until I realized I was most assuredly not her type. 

                I drove with Sycamore and Molly and Margaret in Molly’s parents Toyota Prius, which they would borrow on again and off again and which was a great treat to them, getting significantly better mileage than their usual vehicle, an occasionally unreliable Subaru Outback.  We drove through the San Gabriel Valley, where Margaret had grown up.  We drove for about an hour and a half.  We got lost along the way a little bit.  Eventually we met up with everyone at an outdoor supplies store.  There was another group of people that none of us had met before, and after we left from this initial meet-up spot, to continue on to the hiking launch point, we saw them stopped on the side of the road.  They had pulled over and everyone in our car was very confused by their apparent inability to follow instructions.  We laughed, thinking they had no idea what they were doing.  We could hardly consider that they had their own reasons.  Eventually they met up at the launch point not much later than anyone else.

                We began the hike.  I did not realize it was going to be about ten miles and it was going to take us about eight hours.  We had somewhere between fifteen and twenty people in tow.  Most of them environmentalists, many of them vegan or vegetarian, and the majority of them seemingly happy, healthy individuals.  I reached for a cigarette and everyone started berating me. 

                “You’re going to start a fire!” they said.

                When I finished it, I was careful to put it out safely and calmly, making sure that no embers caused larger flames.  I buried it in a sandy part.  Behind me, Molly unburied it and started carrying it, to throw it away at the end of the hike.  I told her she was ridiculous and I put it inside a plastic bag inside a backpack pocket.  I argued with her and her co-workers about how forcing everybody to follow such a strict code was impossible, there were still people in nowhere towns in middle America that would never recycle no matter how much you convinced them it was essential to our survival, and how people would still always litter, etc.  I called them Nazis.  I was probably a bit out of line, and now I consider myself something of an “environmentally conscious” person—after I did some work for NRDC myself—and I deeply regret how poorly I failed to adjust.

I talked with Sycamore for a while and probably complained about feeling like none of these people would accept me, that I was one of the few odd persons out.  I don’t know what I must have talked about.  At some points during a hike, you may find yourself running at the mouth for a while.  You are just walking, climbing, heading down a pre-determined path, in search of natural beauty, or a scenic overlook.  You push forward and you talk about random things, but I must have had a rather negative bent because the two people I considered my closest friends on this hike had seemed to grow tired of me.

                “You know, it’s really easy to shit on everything,” Sycamore had said to me. 

                I didn’t know exactly what he meant by that, but it sounded like he was just exasperated with my negativity.  Later we had lunch, and Sycamore climbed a tree in the area, and I told him it would be awful if he fell because we still had several hours of hiking left and it would not be easy to carry on in an injured state.  After lunch, I think I had another cigarette, far away from everyone and no one seemed to notice or care.  Then we continued hiking some more, and as I recall this period was relatively free of peril.  Then we came to an impasse.  We could either continue the hike, up to the top of Strawberry Peak, or we could turn back and wait at the car for everyone else to leave.  I would have just as well gone home at that point, but Sycamore and Molly wanted to go to the top and I figured, it was wait and do nothing at the car, or it was go on, get some more exercise (even though we had probably done well enough for ourselves already), and see some height-enhanced beauty.

                Well, my complaints took on an even more absurd form at this point, as Molly began to grow tired and they began to fall back from the pack.  I caught up to Margaret and Bart and told them that I think I had offended Sycamore and Molly, that I had crossed the line somewhere.  I told them they were going too slow anyways, and the only reason I was going up was because they wanted to, at which point they probably wished they had never invited me to come along.  Well, Bart, Margaret and I made it to the peak, and we waited for Sycamore and Molly to join us.  After about ten more minutes they did, and I was so happy to finally start our final descent.  I lit another cigarette in celebration and this exasperated everyone.  At one point Molly started saying something about how I didn’t care about anything.

                “I care, I care!” I said.

                “No, you don’t!” she insisted, finally sounding as if she had reached the end of her rope.  It took us awhile but we finally met up with everyone else about forty-five minutes later, and I was able to throw out my three cigarettes in a garbage can.  Erin and Nathaniel had wanted us to follow them in our car and meet us at a place for root beer or something and we did, and we found the place was closed.  We rode with Margaret for a while and she talked about wanting to read William Faulkner.  One thing she and Molly had talked about that day was how they were the only two members of the LOVE club: Left-handed, Only child, Vegan, Environmentalist.  I don’t know why this pissed me off so much—maybe because I was left-handed but none of the other three and I felt left out. 

We got back to the supply store and Margaret switched cars to go back to Santa Monica and it was just me and Sycamore and Molly to go back to Silverlake, for me, and Hollywood, for them.  We didn’t say anything for the rest of the ride.  Finally, after we made the final turn for the street, I had to make my apology.

“I just wanted to say, if I upset you with anything I said today, I hope you can forgive me.”

They didn’t say anything and I got out of their car and they drove home.  I didn’t hear back from them until May 23^rd, when they were the only people to show up to my housewarming party.

That night I was excited because I was going to drink a bottle of wine and read the Dennis Cooper novel Try—the same manner in which I had read it some four and a half years earlier, in Paris.  The experience was not disappointing.  A couple weeks later I would send out the invites to my housewarming party.  I sent an e-mail to Nathaniel asking him if Sycamore and Molly had ex-communicated me.  He said he didn’t know anything about it—maybe they just needed some temporary space.  He said that Bart had said we probably shouldn’t have climbed to the peak for the sake of all of our sanities.  I had been very bitter for a few days, that they had told me I should move to California only for them to turn their backs on me, and I had started work on a novel with the theme being all of my closest friends eventually betraying me.  I was very happy when they proved me wrong and things went back to normal.  Still, I feel now that I had been a child who had been given a “time out.”

Company in Nashville

Company in Nashville

                My friend Alec had called me when I was in Memphis and said he was thinking about getting away from his parent’s house for a couple days—would it be okay if he drove down to Nashville and took a mini-vacation with me?  I told him of course—I thought it would be great to have company so early on in the trip.

                It wasn’t that bad of a drive from Memphis to Nashville and I had picked out a Comfort Inn hotel at an area that seemed convenient, and it actually wasn’t.  The hotel ended up costing over $75 per night, and I would stay there two nights.  It was off a highway exit about nine or ten miles from the downtown area of Nashville.  I arrived in the late afternoon and waited for Alec.  I went on the internet and found out Modest Mouse was playing a show at the Ryman Auditorium the next night.  Johnny Marr had recently joined the group and I had been very excited to see them in this rather inspired incarnation.  Alec arrived sometime around five or six, not much more than an hour after myself.  We smoked a bowl or two and I played him “Chinese Rocks” off of the new Richard Hell album I had just bought and referred to it as the greatest song about drugs, ever, which in hindsight sounds a bit overblown.  We decided to try to find the “honky-tonk” bars on 6^th St. We stopped in a Jack-in-the Box across the street before we headed downtown.  We found a microbrewery restaurant and had a decent meal and asked the waitress where we should hang out and she told us to go to the Flying Saucer, which ended up being a pretty cool bar, I guess.  After we left we walked past this hotel that had been built out of a renovated train station and were quite moved by its magnificent architecture.  Also notable was a building part of Nashville’s skyline that appeared to have some kind of empty box as its antenna.

                The next day we went to Bell Buckle, TN to visit my college friend Kristen, who had recently taken up a teaching position at the Webb School, where she had gone to high school.  It took us a little over an hour to get there from Nashville, just past Murfreesboro in a tiny town called Bell Buckle, which mostly just contained that school.  For a while I thought I had gotten lost on my mapquest directions, but it turned out alright.  We talked with Kristen for about an hour in her faculty-appointed apartment inside a dormitory.  She seemed happy and it was sort of unreal to be seeing her.  I was so glad I was able to make it to such a random locale.  Afterwards we walked around the campus a bit.  I think she had a dog that she had recently gotten and we had taken it for a walk.  At the end of it we posed for a picture.  Alec and I went on our way and we stopped for gas, and I called my brother-in-law Steve, who had gone to school at Vanderbilt, and I asked him what he used to do when he went out in Nashville.

After that, we went to Grimey’s Records, which was one of the best record stores I had ever been to.  They had in-store appearances from Liars coming up.  It was a small store, but they had everything I could have wanted.  I think I bought a used version of the Nirvana Unplugged in New York album there.  I also bought the New Pornographers album that had just come out, Challengers.  We also went to a used bookstore and I bought a copy of Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae and George Eliot’s Middlemarch.  Then we drove past the Ryman Auditorium as people were beginning to line up around for the Modest Mouse show, and I managed to buy a ticket off of someone there and I was very happy.  We drove back to the Comfort Inn and Alec said he was going to go and I took a shower and smoked another bowl and drove out and found a good parking space and walked into Ryman Auditorium and sat down next to a young couple. 

The guy seemed a little bit drunk.  I think he was drinking from a flask.  He asked me what I was doing in Nashville and I told him about my road trip and he got very excited, telling me that I was living his dream for when he got out of college.  I talked to another young couple on the other side of me and noticed that Interpol would be playing at the Ryman Auditorium soon from the flyer the guy was holding.  I asked if he was going to see them and he said he would probably just go to the in-store appearance at Grimey’s.  I couldn’t believe Interpol would even be going there—that store was great!  Soon after Modest Mouse took the stage and played a wonderful show.  We were all in benches there, it reminded me a bit of sitting in pews at church, but everyone was standing up and swinging back and forth to the music.  At the end I went back to the hotel, probably got some fast-food for dinner, and went to sleep.  Chapel Hill was next.  Nashville had been somewhat interesting, but I had to admit I had more fun in Memphis.  

Literary Criticism

Literary Criticism

                It is time I make a bold announcement: this volume is being written in 30 days, for the sake of the NaNoWriMo contest.  One of the rules of this contest is that you must complete 50,000 words in one month of entirely new writing.  I am about to cheat a little bit.  I will make my target above 50,000 words by however long this, and ensuing (if any) cut and pasted sections contain.  For example, this is 978 words, so my new target is 50,978 words.  You may think I am just swimming against the current, but one of the most important elements to this story of Los Angeles is introduced herein:

So I’m sitting laying down on my dermatologist’s operating table, waiting somewhere in the range of thirty minutes for her to enter.  She enters.

“Oh, you’re making yourself at home I see!”

“Sorry, it was more comfortable than sitting up.”

“Oh that’s fine, I’m sorry, the 5:00 rush.”

She asks me a few questions about what I am taking (topical Cipro, mixed in an apothecary jar with cleanser, applied with a cotton swab at morning and night, SalHydro, applied with a cotton swab at morning and night, Zionen, applied at night, and Dr. Bussel’s—the founder of this medical office—Anti-Bacterial cleanser, washed with at morning and night) and she guesses that the Zionen is causing the dry, chapped abrasions at the lower right side of my lip.  She decides to give me a moisturizer.  Then she says she would like to do some injections. 

She says she hates doing them, and they are extremely annoying, but in a way they are almost like acupuncture.  It is soothing to be through with the pain, afterwards. 

“So what are you doing for Thanksgiving?” Dr. Goldring asks as she moves the needle up against my right cheek, near the ear.

“I’m going to Boulder, my whole family’s going there,” I say, grabbing my pants at the front waist, on the belt, squeezing. 

Pinch.

“Oh, I hate doing this.”

“It’s okay, that’s why I do the belt thing.”

“I’d hold your hand if I could, but then…”

“It’s okay I would probably squeeze it too hard and hurt you, or your depth perception would get thrown off with your other hand and you would miss your mark.”

“I know!”

I don’t remember how we got onto the subject, who brought it up, but I think it was her.

“So, what do you do again?”

“Well, I’m a temp for an accounts payable department of an investment company, but….”

“But you want to be a wr---“

“A writer, yes, but this weekend I had a horrible experience with this woman telling me that I should just quit because I’m never going to get published.”

“Oh, do tell,” she says, moving the needle down towards my chin.

“Well, I’ve been exchanging e-mails with this woman, we’ve corresponded about ten, or twelve times….”

Squeeze.  Pinch.

“Like at first she was being pretty nice, but really delicate, and then she said she could be harsh if I wanted her to be, and I said, yes, bring the harshness.”

“Right, constructive criticism.”

“Yeah, so then she starts telling me, a few days ago, that I was either a) lazy, or b) too afraid of failure to really try,”

“Well, that’s,”

“Right, like she knows anything about me, and then she said something like ‘For the love of God don’t say that you’re only twenty-four and you don’t have enough experience, excuses, excuses.’  Then she said  that her writing was at a “higher level” than mine, and then something like, ‘when we agreed to a mentor/protégé relationship, I didn’t expect so much resistance from you’ and I was like, ‘Aren’t we supposed to be having a discussion, or are you just telling me what the only possible truth is,’

“She’s just saying her way is the right way,” Dr. Goldring says, moving the needle to my left cheek.

Squeeze.  Pinch.

“Right, but then she’s making all of these assumptions about me, and I mention something to her about how I was talking to a friend and she asked me if I had finished my MFA applications yet, and I was like, I haven’t even started them yet, and then this woman starts getting on my case about that, saying, ‘How do you possibly expect to get something polished turned in?’

“Oh that’s a bunch of nonsense, I know plenty of people who waited up until the last minute and stayed up the night before turning in their med school applications, some people work better under pressure,” she says, moving the needle near my left cheekbone, towards the ear. 

“She just keeps telling me I need to revise, and I was like, ‘I get the point,’ but she doesn’t stop, she says I have to sit down with 20-30 pages of writing and revise it until it’s as good as it can be, and she doesn’t even respond to my side of things, which is, I finished this novel, and I was asking her if it was worth revising or not, and she never gave me a straight answer on it, and I started a second novel, because I wanted to do something new, I didn’t want to spend another two years revising the first one on top of the two years spent writing it,”

Squeeze.  Pinch.

“So I said I wanted to do something new, and she says I won’t learn anything by doing something new.”

“But don’t you think you get something out of doing that first draft?  It is an achievement in and of itself to finish something of that length.  You learn something by doing that.”

“That’s exactly what I was saying to her, but she wouldn’t say anything about that.’

“I think we’re all done here…How old is she?”

“Early to mid-30’s.”

“Is she married?”

“Yes.”

“Does she have kids?”

“Yes.”

“Well maybe she’s crazy, maybe we can psychoanalyze her!”

We laugh.  Oh, Dr. Goldring…

“I do think she is wrong about a couple of things, I’m going to go and get your moisturizer.”

I sit and wait and think about the errands I need to run tonight: Westwood Farmacy, Rancho Park Branch of the Public Library, Ralph’s at Venice and Overland, and I still won’t make it to Cinefile or Macy's to buy more pairs of socks until another night.  And I still won’t start my grad school application for another night; because It’s already 8:37, and I should probably go to bed in an hour.

The Last Tea Party

The Last Tea Party

                On my way from Nashville to Chapel Hill, my odometer for a single tank of gas passed 400 miles around Asheville, NC.  This made me very proud of my Honda Civic.  It was a black, “special edition” EX, defined as such because of the spoiler atop the trunk, the special rims on the tires, and the six-CD changer in the dash.  Before leaving on my trip, my CD changer had been broken.  The only part that still worked of the audio apparatus was the radio and the AUX plug which I used for my iPod.  So far, it’s been adequate. 

                I stopped for gas in Asheville because my emergency level low-fuel light as I hovered around 400 miles to the tank (at the time, for roughly a 12 gallon tank, it would cost between $32 and $35 to fill).  Much of that leg of the trip was through the Smoky Mountains and I was glad my car had handled it so efficiently.  After Asheville, I headed towards Chapel Hill, my next stop.

                At this point I should mention my love for Superchunk.  All day—the date being August 25, 2007—I listened to all of the Superchunk albums I had on my iPod (all except their self-titled debut) in chronological order.  I was pumped to be driving into their hometown.  I thought I might catch a cool indie rock show, or might run into them by chance.  I had met their lead singer a couple years earlier at a Portastatic (his other band) show in Chicago.  I had bought their most recent album from in person as he sat alone at the merch desk, smoking a cigarette and drinking a beer.  I was surprised to see him smoking and it immediately made me like him more because we had one embarrassing thing in common.  I went up to him, quite soused, and told him that the bartender had asked me if I was there to see Portastatic, and I had said yes, and he had told me that I better slow down then, as I had about three Leinenkugel Reds in a span of thirty or forty-five minutes (watching Mary Timony amidst that, and making friends with an older guy who complimented me on my Sebadoh t-shirt and told me about how he once saw the Replacements at Maxwell’s in Hoboken).  I couldn’t resist.  They were $2 each.  This singer, an idol of mine, (I had told him I was a huge fan and he must have known that I wasn’t exaggerating) listened to my stupid story and seemed to think it was one of the funniest things he had ever heard.  He started cracking up.  I had made one of my idols crack up—a feeling of true happiness.  I told him I wanted to buy the new album but I didn’t have the cash so I was going to step over to the ATM a few feet to the left and get some cash, even though it was probably going to be a rip-off for the ATM surcharge inside a bar.  Surprisingly, it was only a $1.00 for that, and I pointed this out to the singer, and bought the album, and I have listened to this album (Bright Ideas) fairly regularly for these last three years.  The part of the story I don’t tell, however, is that due to my imbibing so many beers, I had to pee several times in succession.  After trying to pee in one of the urinals or toilets in a somewhat insecure stall or crowded bathroom, I could not go.  This is the bane of my existence and is probably the reason I will end up committing suicide one day.  It is a result of social anxiety invading the most usual of bodily functions and has ruined my ability to “go out” in any normal sense of the word.  I just wish more establishments utilized single-person bathrooms, then I wouldn’t have any problem.  (This actually happened to me at the Blue Monkey Lounge in Memphis, and I was able to hold it until I walked back to my hotel, but I nearly burst from how badly I had to go, but I didn’t feel like mentioning it then).  My solution, in this particular case, was to leave the bar every fifteen or twenty minutes or so and pee in a nearby alley.  After watching Portastatic for about thirty or forty-five minutes, for some reason I decided to leave.  I had the album and I was tired, drunk, and had to pee too much.  Still, despite all the attendant anxiety, it was a memorable and fun show—my first introduction to the Empty Bottle.

                But I drove into Chapel Hill that night, and school at UNC was just starting up and I wanted to find a hotel nearby the main campus strip so I could hang out in bars and maybe find a cool record store and maybe meet some cute college girls.  This was the first time I didn’t procure a hotel before leaving the previous town.  Sometimes it paid off and sometimes it didn’t.  This was one of the times it didn’t.  I went to one really nice hotel in the middle of the campus strip area and the very nice agent at the front desk told me it would cost over $200 for a night and I told him it was outside my budget and he directed me towards Durham, where I could find a more reasonable room.  After driving around feeling like I got lost for about fifteen or twenty minutes, I finally found some low-end chain hotels.  I ended up staying at the Red Roof Inn and it ended up costing me over $70.  I smoked a bowl and looked at my stash and realized that there was almost nothing left.  This depressed me briefly as I considered I would either smoke my final bowl that evening, or the next day before I left for New York. 

                I drove my car back into the main campus area, parked, and tried to find an ATM along an abandoned area.  If there was a fun area to party in Chapel Hill, I definitely didn’t find it.  Somehow I got some more money (at 112 E. Main Carrboro, I read from an online statement) and I walked past a bar and saw a girl.  I asked her if the bar was cool and she said it was so I went inside and got a beer.  I talked to her for a second outside and found out her name was Amy.  Now we are still friends on MySpace.

                I went into the back room and picked out a few songs off the jukebox were people were lazing back against a couch.  I picked the REM song, “All the Right Friends,” a Link Wray song, “Jack the Ripper,” and a song by firehose  that I forget the name of but which was really awesome.  At the time, I was working on my letter to Sycamore, and I mentioned all of these by name so if you ever want the specific information you can feel free to ask him.

                Amy had told me that a band called The Last Tea Party would be playing there.  They were some kind of folk-bluegrass-punk band and I really liked them, especially their last song.  At one point there was an older gentleman in the bar, a record producer I think, who got very excited and bought the entire bar a round of drinks.  Amy introduced him to me and we chatted briefly.  He was exceedingly cool.  If I met him now I don’t think I would have that much to say to him, but I met him when I was at that very ecstatic moment in my life—ecstatic for everything except how little pot I had left.  I had a few drinks there and got a pretty good buzz on, asked Amy for her info so I could add her on MySpace, and asked what might be a good place to get some late-night dinner.  I was told to go to Gumby’s Pizza.

                I placed an order for a large pepperoni pizza at Gumby’s and waited outside for about ten or fifteen minutes.  I heard a Morrissey solo song while I was waiting, something off You are the Quarry, and I thought it was really awesome how I got to hear another indie rock song in a seemingly unlikely location.  I got my Gumby’s pizza, drove back to the Red Roof Inn, pigged out and ate most of it, saving a few slices for the long drive the next day, smoked my last bowl of weed, and passed out.  The next day I headed for New York, which was something like a ten or twelve hour drive.

Doctor's Note

Doctor’s Note

                On May 16, 2008, I drove from my new apartment in Silverlake to Venice Beach.  I had seen an ad in the L.A. Weekly for a medical marijuana clinic that welcomed walk-in appointments.  They had listed the price at $75 for a prescription. 

                The first time I got a prescription, I had to jump through all sorts of hoops.  First of all, I needed a California State ID.  I went to the DMV and just when I was about to get my picture taken, one of the tellers determined that my passport was not suitable for identification purposes, because the little plastic sheet over the picture had become unstuck (because I had foolishly sent it to the dry-cleaner in the inside pocket of my jacket).  This meant I would need a birth certificate, so I went online and ordered mine for about $50 or so and waited about a week and a half, or two, for it to come in the mail.  Finally it arrived, I went back to the DMV, I got my picture taken, and then they told me that I wouldn’t be able to get my actual card for another two weeks.  But they gave me a receipt that the ID had been instated. 

                This all after I had already met with Dr. Sonia Patel, who had given me a preliminary three-month prescription for my chronic back pain, insomnia, and anxiety, to be upgraded to a one-year clearance after examination with another doctor.  I had her note, but I needed my ID card.  That day I went to the Farmacy in West Hollywood with my DMV receipt and doctor’s note, and they said that would do just fine.  Thus I was allowed to get weed without going to a dealer, which was both a blessing and a curse.  A blessing because it was perfectly legal, and a curse because it was pretty much always available for me to blow large amounts of cash on.

                But after three months my prescription ran out because I never had gotten around to getting that second opinion from a more probing general physician.  By that point I was living in Palms with my new roommate Brett who always picked up more pot than he needed and always sold me some, so I relied on this method for a while, until I moved into my own place, which was the killing gesture.

                I had been living in my own place for about two and a half weeks.  I had been surviving off of the last stash I had bought from Brett, and now I needed to take care of things on my own.  First, Brett told me to go to his doctor—Dr. Cohen. When I called Dr. Cohen he sounded very flustered.  I knew he wouldn’t make things difficult for me, but then he told me he had raised his price from $150 to $250.  I stupidly told him I would pay that exorbitant amount.  I made an appointment with him only for him to cancel it because of his own back pain.  We rescheduled for a new day and I drove to his office building in Beverly Hills and waited for him to arrive and about ten minutes after our scheduled time he called me to say he had been in a car accident, and would only be a few more minutes if it weren’t for the lady he had gotten into it with, who wanted to call the police.  I told him that was fine, and rescheduled for yet another time.

                I told my friend Sycamore about this and he told me this guy did not sound very reliable and that I should just be concerned about it because if he happened to lose his license, then I would be out of luck for my prescription, not to mention with the exorbitant fee already paid to him.  So I went to the pages of L.A. Weekly and decided a walk-in appointment for $75 sounded pretty great.

                It was right across the boardwalk from Muscle Beach—the outdoor gym where I barely ever saw anyone working out.  I walked up the stairs and signed in at the desk.  The security guard was making small talk with everyone waiting.  I wrote in my little orange notebook a list of things to do.  Among them were: buy invitations, find Ashleigh’s info, buy a house phone (which could be put off), get a new cell phone (which could be put off), return L.A. Story to the library, measure space in apartment for bar table, futon, find rug to go on top of carpet, get a bathroom storage thingy, do a practice LSAT on Monday, see Mike Toumayan on Sunday at 2:00, complete the 18^th and 19^th chapters of S/M.  The security guard asked me what I was doing and I told him I was writing in my journal and he told me a story about how he had found someone’s journal left on a bus before.  The TV in the waiting room was playing a hip-hop video countdown.  One of the assistants came up to tell the guy at the front desk that there was a guy on the boardwalk taking pictures of the front of their building and it appeared suspicious.  Two Latinos without shirts tried to sign in for an appointment and were turned away until they could find shirts to wear.  The wait was not very long.  They took my picture before they sent me into the doctor’s room.  They also asked for $150 for the recommendation fee—double the advertisement, but still much better than the alternative.

                I met Dr. Weinman, who was very friendly and nice and concerned.  He got a cup of coffee before we started the interview and said that it was his alternative to pot, which he had used to smoke but no longer did.  I told him about how I was going to take the LSAT and he told me to take a few weeks off of smoking before I did that—six weeks, he said.  I told him I wanted the prescription for social anxiety and depression and he said that would be okay.  He said in the case of depression, he wouldn’t recommend it.  He would recommend seeing a therapist.  He said he would recommend it for anxiety, however.  Then he asked me about how I smoked it and I told him through a bong and he explained to me the benefits of a vaporizer.  He was a very benevolent man, perhaps one of the few people I met in that entire year that did not cause me any fear or stress, perhaps the only person who truly seemed to be looking out for my well-being.  He gave the prescription and I was allowed to go into their on-site dispensary and I picked out a gram because I said that money was tight at the moment.  I drove home on an ecstatic wave, happy that now, I had my license to smoke, I had nothing to worry about.

The Launch

The Launch

                The drive from Chapel Hill to New York contained one hiccup—an hour-plus delay due to some graffiti over the highway in Washington D.C.  Someone had spray-painted some kind of message that I don’t remember, and all of the drivers had rubbernecked on the graffiti.  I had been listening to the traffic report on the radio and anticipating the site for a while, and it was rather underwhelming.  After that the traffic moved smoothly.

                On my way into New York I called my friend Gabe and asked if I could get an ounce off of him.  He said he could make that happen and I stopped at an ATM in an oasis along the New Jersey Turnpike to take out a few hundred dollars for the purchase.  An hour later I was on Manhattan in my car and parking it in the East Village.  This was the second time I had my car with me in the city—the first time being a little over two years before, when I had driven my sister to school in New Hampshire, and had visited my friend Sycamore up in Maine, and had driven down to New York and parked it in a garage because it was the convenient and easy thing to do. 

                I walked up to Gabe’s apartment and he measured out an ounce for me and I gave him $360.  I would find out a day or so later that I had bought the ounce immediately following a famous child star who had recently enrolled at NYU, and who had also bought an ounce.  No, not the Olsen twins—though they had enrolled in the same school within NYU as me, and we had actually attended for one shared semester—but Haley Joel Osment.  I thought this was wonderful good luck as I prepared to make my way towards Hollywood.

 Shirtless Joe Jordan arrived, named as such because he always walked around New York with no shirt.  Once he had been a finalist on the MTV show Yo Mama which contained infinite variations on “Yo Mama’s so fat…” jokes.  We smoked some and I had planned to stay with Wendy that evening.  I told Gabe and Joe that my car, with all of the stuff packed in it, was on the street, and they started making me paranoid that someone would break into it and rob me.  This had happened to a friend several years before—he had his guitar stolen out of his car after leaving it parked around 30^th St. overnight.  I made sure it was okay to go over to Wendy’s apartment, even though I had very little idea how to get there. 

                I got in my car and drove over the Williamsburg Bridge.   After some nervousness, I found Wendy’s place in Greenpoint.  She was waiting outside for me.  I parked right near the front of her building and came out and hugged her tight.  We went inside and I don’t remember much about the night except I am assuming we smoked and then I remember this awkward moment where I begged her just to hold me, or to let me hold her, and she sat stricken on the side of her couch, clearly not wanting to acquiesce to my demands, but doing so half-heartedly. 

When I woke up in the morning and went to my car, I found a parking ticket.  If I had moved it at 7:30 AM I could have avoided it.  My own stupidity—not paying close enough attention to the sign above the sidewalk.  Upset, I drove into Manhattan and found parking on University Place and went to my friend Mike’s apartment where I would stay for the next couple of days.  Let me say that I do not remember much at all about my trip to New York this time.  I remember finding that excellent spot on University Place, where it would remain for three days without any kind of parking restrictions, no attempted theft, and secure comfort.  The Fall semester at NYU had just started and thousands of students paraded up and down that primary artery of campus.  I would later go into the NYU bookstore and get and NYU bumper sticker for my car, as well as a New York University tank-top that was probably one size too small.  With the bumper sticker on it there, it felt even safer.  This would not be the case (in my own suspicious mind) three months later, but for now, all was happy and perfect.  I had spent a lot of money since starting my trip—a couple thousand dollars, at least.  But I still had a sizable amount remaining--$18,000 or so—and my car was parked on University Place, one of the happiest areas of New York City, and I was staying at my friend’s luxurious loft apartment on 12^th St. between University and Broadway, not three or four short city blocks to my car.

I went around and visited everyone I could in New York, but the specific experiences are always muddled in my mind.  New York is a state of mind and the events enjoyed there never really differ from what was done before.  Walk around the village, get some slices, go to Pluck-U at least once, get some 40’s, go to see some friend’s band that is playing that weekend, take the subway into Brooklyn, visit a friend who happens to be moving into a new apartment at the time.  None of it particularly revelatory or worth writing about—just comforting in its sameness, only less and less so as we grow older and our carefree college mentalities slip further and further into the past. 

Adam, my roommate for two years in college, had moved into a new place near TriBeCa, and I went to go visit him and met his new roommate, who had once slept on our freshman year dorm room floor and who I barely remembered.  I met Adam’s girlfriend, Chloe, who would not be going out with him much longer.  Though she was very sweet, I remember.  I sat outside on his concrete deck, where one month later he would host a party that I would also be able to attend.

I took the train into Brooklyn and met up with Wendy again and went to Eric’s birthday party, which was in a weird location of Williamsburg—behind some pizzeria—but we found it eventually.  There I saw the majority of people who had also been at my Pitchfork Party a month and a half before.

I also saw Charlotte, who had been one of my last great crushes of college, and who had become an assistant to a literary agent at the William Morris Agency, and who had agreed to take a look at my first novel, Daylight Savings Time, back that previous June, the last time I had been in New York.  We had met up at a bar near Union Square and she had talked with me for an hour or two—she had been very generous with her time—and told me that it was not up to the standards that she would want to represent.  I had not finished the novel yet at that point—I would finish it just a few days before August 21—but it made writing the ending feel a bit meaningless, though I do believe the last chapter was the strongest piece of the entire work.  Over the last year or so, I’ve come to feel that my first novel is good enough to publish if only the market were not so unfriendly to fairly unconventional work.  With that in mind, I wrote my second novel, Self-Mutilation, and I would love to be able to submit it to someone at the William Morris Agency, except Charlotte has recently begun her first year of studies at Harvard Law School.  Regardless I should still ask her if she might have a contact who would listen a little more closely to me than if I played my usual role of the anonymous, desperate, unpublished, querying writer.

The party at Eric’s was a great time.  That was probably the single happiest time I had on that particular trip to New York.  But I was focused on the road trip—better times were about to come, and I would be back in New York a month from then for a wedding.  (As a fun side-note on the present, I’ve recently made plans to attend my second wedding in New York a little over a month from now—some times prescience is divine.)

I talked to Sam on the phone and he told me to meet him in Larchmont, NY on the morning of August 27, and we would drive from Kelly’s parent’s house there up to his Mom’s house in Meriden, CT, which would take about an hour and a half or so, if that.  I found this annoying, but after he explained it, I realized it had to be done.  He also gave me an Adderall pill which made the extra side-trip a lot more fun.  We picked up the stuff from his house and found his brother Todd there.  I am always intimidated by Todd but this time I found him more mature than previous times and he did not make as many offensive attacks on my person.  We packed everything into my car, which I worried about more than I should have, and we headed back to Larchmont. 

There, parked in Kelly’s parent’s driveway, I received the phone call.  My Dad.  He had recently called when I was on my way from Chapel Hill to New York, somewhere in Virginia, to tell me that their basement had flooded, and all of my stuff that I had brought back from my apartment had been ruined.  I started to get upset, but then felt like there was nothing that I could do about it, but then he told me he was kidding.  Their floor was destroyed, but they had acted quickly enough to get my CDs and books and various items out of there before any damage could occur.  My mom wasn’t at the house then, she had been in Boulder, CO, helping my younger brother get settled.  I think she returned to Chicago on August 25, or August 26.

“Dad, what’s up?”

“Well, we have had a very serious tragedy occur here.”

“What!  What do you mean?”

“Before I say anything, I just want you to know that everyone is O.K.  We had a very serious incident, but thankfully it is going to be alright in the end.”

“What happened?”

“Your brother, Michael, was stabbed in the neck this morning on the CU Boulder campus.”

“Oh my God,” I said, not knowing how to react to something like that.

“He’s fine, he went into the emergency room and had stitches put in.  The doctors said that if it were just another centimeter away in either direction, he would be dead.”

“That’s insane.”

“Everything is fine, he’s okay.  It was this crazy man on the sidewalk.  He was screaming something about it being the end of the world.  And Michael walked past, and he grabbed him, and stabbed him in the neck, and then he started stabbing himself.”

“Jesus!”

“And a bunch of other students saw it occur, and they thought it was some kind of staged performance!  They thought Michael and this guy were acting it out for some kind of school theater thing!”

“This is so awful.”

“I know, but it’s okay.  We’re about to get on a plane to Boulder right now.  Call us in a few hours and we’ll update you on the situation.” 

I hung up the phone and told Sam and he also responded with shock.  It was the first of many times I would tell my friends about this occurrence and know beforehand that I would get to see the look of shock and sympathy and horror on their faces.  We unloaded the car and put all of our stuff together.  I thought this might throw the road trip a bit off, but we still re-packed the car to make everything fit.  We went to the garage and looked at Sam’s new bike that he and Kelly would be riding across the country.  I sat outside by Kelly’s parent’s pool and dozed for a few minutes on a bench there.  Then I called my Mom and talked to her and received more information and gradually began to feel more comfortable about the reality of what had just occurred.  I thought this would change everything forever.  No longer would I, the middle-child, inarguably the most depressed and fucked-up member of our family, carry all of the sympathetic attention.  No, now it would be my younger brother, who had been attacked, assaulted—a true victim—unlike me, who had everything handed to him on silver platter and still managed to ruin my life and everyone’s I touched. 

We went inside the house and I told Kelly’s parents about what had happened and they responded similarly in kind.  I was a random kid that showed up at their house, the friend of their daughter’s boyfriend, and immediately after meeting them, had one of the most shocking incidents of my family’s history to deal with.  They were very kind people.  We ended up watching Law & Order: Special Victims Unit in the upstairs den, and I got into the show more than I ever did before.  Then, my brother Michael called me himself, and told me that he was fine, it was a really scary thing, but he was fine.  I didn’t ask him any direct questions about the incident, and I still don’t really think I have, more than a year later.  He told me it was fine though, and that I should just meet him in Boulder, continue with my road trip as planned.  I thanked him for being so understanding and selfless.  I told Sam and Kelly and we decided we would leave the next day.  Before we went to bed, we snuck out into the backyard at night and smoked a blunt.  Sam loved rolling blunts; I loved taking bong rips.  We went swimming in their pool after smoking and it was great.  We all went to bed and woke up early the next day.

We started off around 9 AM and found ourselves a few minutes later on the George Washington Bridge, proceeding at a slow crawl.  Sam had to walk his bike all the way across the bridge, I remember seeing.  Kelly was behind him on the bike, swaying back and forth in ecstasy to the music they were blasting, I remember seeing.  

Homeless Man in Westwood Village

Homeless Man in Westwood Village

                I don’t remember the exact date I arrived in L.A.  It might have been September 17 or it might have been September 19 or it might have been September 21.  I’m going to say the last one for the sake of the argument.  This is also something Sycamore could tell you for sure, as he has that letter in which I chronicled my entire month on the road. 

                He told me to meet him when he got out of work at UCLA Medical School for the day—at 5:00.  He said to try to find a parking spot near Wilshire and Westwood Blvd—the first time I would hear these streets names with which I would soon become so familiar.  I found a metered parking spot very close to the location specified, and was heartened to see the car in front of me display a prominent Fugazi sticker on their back window.  The first car I park behind in L.A. also digs Fugazi—this had to be destiny. 

I walked over to the Coffee Bean shop to spend another hour or hour and a half waiting for Sycamore.  In line I heard some people talking about where Spike Jonze was shopping.  I was really in Hollywood!  The first conversation I overheard was about a celebrity!  It was only a matter of time before I would meet one on my own and parlay it into a successful gig in the entertainment industry.  I was so excited. 

I order a caramel frappucino, or whatever the Coffee Bean equivalent of that most favorite Starbucks drink of mine happened to be called, and sat outside in the warm sun.  I opened up my laptop to do a little more work on the beginning of Self-Mutilation, the second novel I was now going to take on full-time.  Then I saw a homeless man come up near me, and he just started talking. 

The following is a journal entry I just found that I wrote on the day it happened (September 18).  As before, I will add the total of words I am cutting and pasting here to the 50,000 that I must write on my own during this month.  Thus, 50,978 now becomes 52,018:

9.18.07

Sitting in my car on Le Conte (near Westwood)

I’m waiting for Sycamore to get out from his job at 5:00.  I have thirty minutes.  I wish I had less, but in the time I killed (from 3:00 until now), I went and got a coffee and tried to do some writing.  I couldn’t do any (I did a few sentences of chapter six of self-mutilation) because a homeless man with AIDS talked to me for the entire time.  I couldn’t leave without giving him a dollar, though I’m sure everyone around considered me a sucker.

I had an iced vanilla coffee drink, which was very good, and the man was sitting outside and immediately looked at me and I thought he was some kind of older artist who was checking me out or something, but no, he was homeless, and I don’t believe he was gay.  But this is if I believe his story, which frankly I have a very difficult time believing, but I would like to believe it.  Of course it makes the world seem a much darker place than it really is.  Trying to write it down will only make me seem dumber for actually listening to him. 

He began by saying how he his family had a globally recognized name—which he later revealed to be Welch.  He had a PHD in Physics from UCLA and had been in the Air Force, until he snitched on them, and subsequently had his life destroyed, with the loss of his social security number.  The secret was, aliens had exchanged technology—apparently they laid fiber optic cables on the ocean floor to connect all continents. 

His father was very rich, and a murderer.  He shot his daughter’s boyfriend—he had slapped her at a gas station and kicked her out of the car.  She called to be picked up, and instead her boyfriend was brought back by two henchmen, and the father shot him.  The father also shot this man’s brother-in-law, who had been a homosexual who had married a daughter for the money, apparently. 

This man had been sent to the Shaolin Temple in Beijing at age 8, and then returned 9 years later to see the hippie era in full bloom.  He had also received oral sex as a 7-year-old from his “wet nurse” once a week prior to that. 

It hurt me to talk to him.  It hurts me to write this, but the man should have a story written for him.  I am hungry—I haven’t eaten since having a massive DQ “flamethrower” last night in Hurricane, UT.  I felt so sick after eating it, because here I am not trying to put on too many pounds, and I get this hamburger as a little snack after having beer & wings nearby, a little snack to make me full, and I ended up being full to excess.  I couldn’t even put a dent in the Blizzard Treat I got as the real reason I went to DQ.  I watched the end of Rope and the first half of Young Frankenstein on AMC, and tonight I want to convince Mike to watch Vertigo (There’s 7 days of Hitchcock on).

So, if what this man says is true, then all conspiracy theories are true.  I equate conspiracy theory with schizophrenia, unfortunately, and so this man was probably just mentally ill.  He maintains that he is not, but I have a hard time believing he would choose to be so down and out, when if he wanted to, he could be extraordinarily rich.  Very difficult for me to get along with anyone in the world, when I can’t tell if I’m being put on or not.  I hope I am not preyed upon while in L.A.  I would like to move here.  It is more affordable than New York, but just now I received my third ticket on this trip, which ends today, and which has lasted 30 days. 

Ticket #1: Greenpoint, Brooklyn.  Parking my car outside Wendy’s house, not realizing I had to move it by 7:30 AM for the street sweeper.  $45.00

Ticket #2: Hardeysville, OK.  Going 40 in a school zone with flashing lights.  There was no one in the town.  It was tiny.  I even got out there to try and use a bathroom in a gas station, but the gas station was condemned.  The cop gave me a break by saying I went 35 instead of 40.  He didn’t search my car—I considered that the break.  $115.00

Ticket #3: Los Angeles, CA.  Parking 1 ft across the line in a metered zone.  I will be contesting this ticket, as I had paid the meter, and it is my first time parking in a metered spot in L.A. and I didn’t realize we have these “line” parameters to follow.  They should take pity on me, but they probably won’t, because IT”S THE LAW!  $35.00

Now, there’s 14 minutes until Mike gets out.  I’m going to sit in this spot and if any cops come, I will explain my ticket.  I just got a call from him.  He’ll be here in 5-10 minutes, so I should just shut this down. 

I enjoy L.A. and I want to get a sublet here in the next few days.  Good-bye Chicago, though I am missing it a bit.  I watched the Bears vs. Chiefs game on Sunday in Boulder, CO, and the game was in Chicago, and seeing the skyline made me a feel a pang of misguided nostalgia.  It is a beautiful city, yes, but filled with so many bitter people.  If I move to L.A., I will have lived in each of the three major cities of America by the time I am 24.  That is something pretty cool to say you’ve done.  I have soaked up the culture of New York and Chicago, and now I must suck up the culture of L.A., and with that knowledge, become the preeminent writer of our generation.  This is all for now.

Note: I believe I meant to write “soak up the culture of L.A.” for parallelism, but that typo is so unbelievably poignant that I can’t bear to correct it.

Day 1 of 3

Day 1 of 3

                After watching Sam walk his bike across George Washington Bridge, I turned up the music.  Now it was time to get going.  Let the trip officially begin.  A rough list of the things we carried in my car:

                -tent

                -air mattress

                -box of Clif bars.

                -pack of Campbell’s soup Chicken Noodle flavor from CostCo

                -My multiple bags (messenger bag, laptop carrying case, duffel bag housing the Ghost, high school backpack colored blue from Eddie Bauer, medium-sized rolling suitcase on its last legs, small size Nike sports bag that I won in a 5K race for raising over $250.00 (money almost entirely from my parents as I recall).

                -laundry basket

                -dishware/cookware

                -crank-up lantern

                -Sam and Kelly’s tent

                -1 pound of Dunkin Donuts coffee grounds

                -Snake bite kit

                -Facial mirror

                -My camcorder

                -Sam’s camera

                -Three old shoeboxes of my letters

                -Alec’s cooler (that I had all summer and forgot to give back to him in Nashville)

                -Small blue plush Krazy Kreek chair that sits on the ground.

                -Stand-up green Eddie Bauer camping chair with cup-holder

                -carton of Camel Turkish Gold cigarettes

                -Absente (imitation Absinthe), irregularly –utilized handle of Popov vodka, Jim Beam whiskey, Bacardi Rum, sugar cubes and fancy instrument for holding Absente-soaked sugar cubes for lighting on fire over glass.

                -Laundry detergent and dryer sheets.

                We got lost somewhere on the New Jersey turnpike.  They got off on an exit that I didn’t know we were taking, and then I turned around to exit on the ramp they had earlier, and then I got a call from them saying they had taken the wrong exit, and had to turn around.  I thought I knew the path we were taking, but I wanted to follow them to make sure we didn’t get separated.  I think this happened again later in the same day near the end of the leg of the journey in Pennsylvania.

                I remember stopping with them at one lone outpost along the highway.  There were two other bikers there and Sam walked over to them and started chatting about their bikes.  This seemed to me like an acknowledged code amongst bikers.  You automatically had someone to talk to based on your shared method of transportation.  You shared part of the same culture that was generally removed from all other mainstream aspects to life.  You either rode a motorcycle or rode in a car.  If you rode a motorcycle you were part of the mystic chain of bikers. 

                There were many random knick-knacks at the outpost.  They did not sell guns but it looked like the type of place many people with guns shopped.  Sam and Kelly bought a snack there.  We decided to spend the night in Harrisburg.  And then we got back on the road. 

                When we got off at a particular Harrisburg exit just past Hershey Park, there were a couple hotels to choose from.  First, we had to stop at a Harley Davidson store, where Sam bought a rain guard for his bike, an outdoor tarp for its protection.  We stopped at a drive-thru bank there, and I still had the receipt for that ATM visit in my car up until a few days ago when I threw it out.

                We went to a Holday Inn Express and they told me they had limited rooms and it would cost about $175 for a night there.  I was not going to pay that much for a room in Harrisburg.  We found a motel that looked like it might be in some level of disrepair.  A room was $55 or $60 a night there.  We took it.  It was definitely one of the most bottom-of-the-line places I stayed.  But it served its function.                            

                That night I talked to my sister Meredith on the phone.  She told me I had to go back to Chicago.  She was moving to Boston that weekend (it was a Thursday night, August 28)—her friend Karen had flown into Chicago so they could drive my sister’s car together over the weekend and arrive in the city on Monday, because Karen had work.  This meant my sister wanted me to drive straight from Harrisburg to Chicago the next day, so that I could drive my sister Emma to school, and take care of the pets.  I told her there was no way I was going to do this and she flipped out at me on the phone and started crying.  After her my friend Brian called and told me he saw the story about my brother on the front page of the Tribune.  My friend (or perhaps former friend, but we’ll find out later) Jill called to make sure that Michael was okay, showing some genuine concern after another one of our typically ambivalent conversations on our cell phones. 

                We went to sleep and I remember watching some of the HBO Series Big Love from our beds after we had watched a somewhat embarrassing episode of “Real Sex”—which featured a group of masturbation enthusiasts.  One of the guys in the group talked about how he jerked off every morning and how it was just the jolt of energy he needed in order to get his day started.  For some reason this struck me as a very odd thing to be talking about on TV. 

                The next day my Dad called me and told me that I was making a huge mistake, and that I should just cut my road trip short.  I asked him if I could go to Chicago, and take Sam and Kelly with me, and allow them to stay at our house while we waited for the situation to get sorted out.  He said that would absolutely not be possible.  He didn’t want these two random kids around during a familial tragedy of this degree.  I told him that I didn’t have any choice but to keep going with them.  I wasn’t going to abandon them.  He told me I was making a huge mistake.

Mike's Two Visits

Mike’s Two Visits

                My friend Mike, who was in law school, who let me stay at his apartment in New York many times, who I counted amongst my best friends, who flew by the seat of his pants, who came to visit me in Los Angeles twice, who stayed at the Beverly Hills Hotel the first time, and the W Hotel the second time, who had no real serious reason for visiting beyond wanting to have some fun on a vacation to California—he has always surprised me.

                The first time he came was in March, and the second time he came was in May.  The first time we went to Disneyland and California Adventure, and the second time we went to Magic Mountain.  The first time we went to an Atlas Sound concert and Lakers vs. Raptors game in the same night, and the second time we went to a Dodgers game.  The first time we walked around Beverly Hills and the second time we walked around Westwood.  The first time I interviewed for a job at UCLA Medical and bought an LSAT Test Prep book after at a Borders in Westwood, and we had California Pizza Kitchen afterwards with a few friends (Sycamore, Molly, Kenny—a young and successful photographer—and Jara, a Cal State-Northridge student in art) and then we went back to my apartment for a few minutes while he read me LSAT sample questions and watched me smoke a bowl and then we went to see Horton Hears a Who at a theater in Santa Monica.  Sycamore had bought a marijuana candy bar that Jara and I split, paying him $5 each.  Those candy bars can be expensive.  But half of one provided a noticeable buzz—which I especially noticed during the scene where Horton turned into a Japanime-style cartoon. 

                The fact was, when Mike came into town, I actually did things.  When I wasn’t going out with friends, I wasn’t doing anything but holing up in my apartment, writing or smoking pot and listening to music, or going for intermittent runs, or figuring out what I was going to eat for dinner, or breakfast, or lunch, or watching my LCD flat-screen television with digital cable that I paid $130 a month for, or going on the internet when it felt like a good way to divert myself, or reading books when I had the motivation to digest something bigger than myself.

                Mike came in towards the middle of March, around March 12 or 13 or so.  I think it was just three days in the middle of the week.  I don’t remember if I took work off for those days or if he tried to make it over the weekend.  No, he stayed into the weekend.  He left on Sunday, I am pretty sure.  I feel like he came in Tuesday, and we just spent the night lazing around Beverly Hills, going to some restaurant with outdoor seating and drinking a very expensive bottle of wine.  Then I feel like on Wednesday night we did the Atlas Sound thing after going to the Lakers game.  Then I feel like on Thursday we went to Disneyland, and I had taken the day off work for that.  Then I feel like I had taken the day off Friday as well, and had just gone in for the interview in Westwood, and had met up with Mike and everyone else in the area at CPK before deciding to see the movie that night.  I think we spent the earlier part of Friday going around Venice Beach and then I had dropped him off at his hotel and gone back to my apartment and gotten changed for the interview.  I know we tried to go the Chateau Marmont bar Friday night, and now I feel like Mike just left on that Saturday.  Yes, I think that’s the way it worked.  We went to Bar Marmont after seeing the movie on this first visit, and decided it was such a cool place to hang out that we went there during his second visit in May as well.

                But this section deserves an homage to Mike as a person—because the events we signed up to attend or the activities we decided to perform do not properly explain our friendship.  No, our friendship goes back some seven years, to the first time I met him in his dorm room, because a friend of mine was high school friends with his roommate.  This isn’t about college though—that can be saved for a later time—one hopes it will not fade from my memory.  But we truly did become close near the end of college—when he studied abroad in Florence and let me act as babysitter to his Jerome Baker bong, which catapulted me into the excessive stoner I became over the ensuing years.  When he returned he picked it back up, and someone else left for the summer and let me babysit their piece as well.  That same summer we took a class together, and he rented his great loft apartment in the village for the first time, and we enjoyed one of the last almost totally carefree periods of our lives. 

Over the Fall semester of our senior year, we fell into a predictable pattern that I loved and appreciated, which was—I would rarely smoke pot at my apartment, because my roommate Ed—while certainly one of the coolest roommates I have ever had, regardless—was not very enthusiastic about the stuff (he wanted to get in the Navy SEALs).  Mike would call me around 5:30 or 6 almost every day of the week and ask me if I would want to come over and smoke a bowl.  As busy as I found myself, I always had time for that, and I would walk down two blocks and right two-and-a-half from 14^th St. and 3^rd Ave. to his place.  And we would smoke and listen to many of the same songs off his iPod and I always felt somewhat safe while in that vicinity.  I particularly remember Halloween night that year—when neither of us really mentioned anything about going out—and we just stayed in his apartment and smoked and watched the old version of The Haunting on TCM and heard random sounds in his apartment and started to think it was haunted too.  Later, perhaps after we graduated, and whenever I would visit, we fell into the rhythm of playing a variety of baseball video games for Nintendo Gamecube and XBOX 360.  After graduating, he stayed in the area for a year and prepared for law school, and I went home.  I went to South Carolina before even graduating and he was one of a dozen or so friends that happened to make it down for Spring Break.  After moving to Chicago, and getting my own apartment there, he came to visit the first summer, while I continued to visit New York intermittingly.  Finally, these two trips to L.A.  These are the last two times I have seen him.

We went to the Lakers game because it seemed like the thing to do.  We bought a mojito and some other vaguely complex mixed drink from this particular concession stand where they guy serving the drinks gave us a few dollars off each drink.  He was just being super nice to us for no reason.  That was the high point of the game—that guy was cool.  Jack Nicholson was at the same game as us, and I swore I saw Lindsay Lohan with some new boyfriend (this was after she had attended rehab and this is before it seemed like she was more interested in girls) and I really wanted to run into her after the game and tell her to join us for the concert, because it was going to be the coolest place to be in the city that night.  We left about with a few minutes left in the game because I was nervous about being late for Atlas Sound’s set.  The Lakers ended up winning.  The Lakers ended up going all the way to the finals the season I was in L.A.

And I’m sorry, but I really can’t go on without mentioning something is going on right now.  I’m being terrorized by an online presence.  This person on an internet message-board—who I seriously suspect of being the same anonymous person who was the subject of the “literary criticism” segment—because I happen to mention something about wondering whether I can call myself bi-polar—because every other day I feel good, and every other day I feel like I just want to crawl into a hole and die—now it has turned into an argument about my revisionary practices.  I will be clear: I despise this person.  I would say “I despise this woman,” because I am 95% sure she is a woman, but I can’t be entirely sure do to the internet’s shadowy nature.  She is absolutely terrorizing me.  When I get a message in my Gmail account, and I see that she has replied to a post of mine, a lump pops up in my chest.  She never says anything nice to me at all.  She hates me.  And I’m very sick and tired of being part of the same community as her—I wish she would change her ways, but I know she won’t.  She’s telling me I need to seek therapy—but not in the gentle, concerned way most people tell you to seek therapy.  She’s telling me to seek therapy basically because she doesn’t like me, and probably hopes that I’ll stop writing, and stop posting on the same message-board as her.  She pays way too much attention to me and it seriously bothers me that she’s obsessed with telling me how stupid I am.  Here is an excerpt that particularly bothers me: “Help-rejection complaining. That's what you do. You ask for help (feedback on your work) and then reject the advice/feedback and then complain about how your life sucks. Blah, blah, blah. You DO need therapy?”

  First of all, I haven’t even asked for feedback on this forum—it was on the NaNoWriMo forum, and nobody bothered me there.  Second of all, this is NaNoWriMo, let’s not talk about revision until we finish our draft, okay?  Third of all, don’t make those kind of snap judgments about me when you don’t even know me in real life.  You’re choosing to devise an interpretation of the most despicable kind.  And then she (he?) happens to say that I do need therapy but with a somewhat difficult to understand question mark.  I would write all of this in reply but then I would just get more of a pissed off response than I will already be receiving, soon.  I wrote to her (him?) that we should be respecting each other and offering positive inspiration.  I wrote that I wondered if she (he?) just got a kick out of pointing out how backwards I am when it comes to writing.  I just wanted to say this here—that this is an ongoing situation which bothers me—I wish everyone that communicated with me online would be my friend, not some enemy that feels more like a grade-school bully than a fellow publishing hopeful.  I will say one more thing—and don’t freak out on me here!—but it would make a great short story, if I had to kill myself but decided to go on a cross-country odyssey to find and murder this person because I had been so disgusted by her (his?) comments and then kill myself afterwards because obviously, life would cease to have value for me.

Thank you for letting me vent a bit there, and add it to my word count.  I usually don’t have a problem with anybody personally—I just have a problem with the world at large, with the stage of society that I have been born into, and the crushing fear that comes with fitting into this overcrowded, highly-educated, highly-specialized workforce which seems to reject me based on my most basic human qualities which are rather difficult for me to change.

Despite his high-level of success, Mike has never been critical of me to the point of being mean.  He went along with me to Atlas Sound even though he didn’t know anything about them.  Bradford Cox is the singer and it is mostly his solo project and it is just about as compelling to me as his other, bigger band Deerhunter.  They’re one of my favorite bands right now, and Cox is one of my favorite artists—in large part because he’s messed up, and has turned his illnesses and weaknesses into extraordinarily powerful art.  I’m messed up too, and I hope one day I’ll be able to eclipse that because of the art I was able to put into the world. 

We drove from the Staples Center downtown southwest a mile or two into Echo Park and found a good parking spot right by the Echo.  We went inside and Atlas Sound was next up on stage and we still had about thirty or forty-five minutes until they would play.  I was wearing my red Adidas headband.  I went outside in the backyard area of the Echo for a cigarette, and could hear Cox out there talking to somebody, sitting at a picnic table.  It had to have been a blogger or journalist.  I had wanted to interview him myself for my blog, but didn’t have the digital audio recorder I would require for that intention.  I finished my cigarette and waited inside and he came in a few minutes later and started the set and he made some kind of banter about at one point about a bandanna or something weird and I thought maybe he had made some kind of reference to me, but that’s probably just me being crazy, and then he played an awesome louder, faster version of “Ativan,” my favorite song on the album, and the show ended, and we left. 

The next day I think I wrote a poem about the experience.  In my little orange journal.  On a cigarette break during my work at Jefferies and Co.  These cigarette break poems should get their own anthology section, but due to the sensitive nature of this particular poem, it will be kept alongside its antecedent experience:

Incident:Shy

I walked out

To the patio for a smoke

I heard your voice

I heard a few words

Like transgressive

Get thrown around

I wanted to ask

For your autograph

In my diary

But I couldn’t

The last thing left to wonder

Did you see me?

On stage and in the crowd

We faced each other perfectly

When you mentioned a bandanna

In your banter

And I was the only one there

Wearing a headband

I thought it might be

A secret message

But that’s just how crazy I am

Still I wonder

Did you see me?

I could have waited for you

After the show

Told you I wanted to interview you

Showed you the 20 songs I wrote

Which you inspired

Told you that you were

The third person I saw perform

In a Wipers t-shirt

Told you how much you meant to me

But I decided to wait

Until I see you again.

That was the second night and the next day we went to Disneyland and I was very excited.  I had gone a few months earlier, and had the visit cut short, and then I had gone for a rescheduled visit due to that incident with my roommate one night where there were hardly any crowds, but I don’t remember when exactly.  In any case this time we were going to buy the park-hopper pass, which meant we could go to both the Magic Kingdom and California Adventure—for the competitive price of $90.00  I really wanted to go on the Tower of Terror and California Screamin’ and Soarin’ over California so I had no problem with this.  My finances were still in a stable condition. 

During the visit with Mike he must have grown tired of my conversation in line.  The good thing was, we barely had to wait in lines at all.  They all moved efficiently and we decided it had been a great day to do the visit.  In line for Space Mountain I began this rant about the credit system in the financial industry, which I wanted to destroy.  I didn’t like the idea of being turned down for an apartment (a search I had just begun to consider) over my credit rating, which insisted how much money I should be making and how much of that I should be spending.  I said the whole system was evil, and that my goal would be to eliminate all of the credit in America through a massive campaign of brainwashing.  Only then would we be able to consider each and every person an equal.  Mike, probably correctly found this overly silly and pointed out the many holes in my argument.  He never told me to shut up, though I was probably being annoying.  I just couldn’t think of anything else to talk about.  On the Matterhorn, finally, we got into the ride, after I had told him I was finished with my credit elimination scheme, and our car would not climb the first hill.  We had to disembark and we walked through the inner workings of the ride, through the mountain itself, and I thought that was pretty cool, and they gave us a free fast pass for another ride later on because of our troubles.  That is one thing I have to hand it to Disney on—they are an excellent example of quality customer service. 

However, later I would find out from reading interviews online that Mark E. Smith and Brix Smith of the English post-punk group the Fall had gone on a visit to Disneyland during one of their tours (Brix was from L.A.) and had waited to ride the Matterhorn and while in line a woman had trouble getting out of her seat and got stuck in the track of the ride and they couldn’t stop the next car from moving through and she had her head cut off by it.  Then all of the Disney characters came over to the Matterhorn area, forming some kind of wall of diversion to take the focus off of the tragic accident that had just happened.  The Fall put out the song “Disney’s Dream Debased” as a reaction to that experience.  I told this to Mike (possibly during his second trip, when we went to Magic Mountain) and he said it sounded like something that was made up.

After a late night at Disneyland, Mike ran into the Beverly Hills Hotel and asked the concierge what would be a good Mexican place and we ended going there, somewhere in West Hollywood on Sunset Blvd.  It was okay but I had nothing to talk about.  I was really tired. 

The next day I took him to Venice and we walked down the boardwalk and out to the pier and I made him go into Small World Books with me, because I had always seen it and always wanted to go in, but never done it before.  Also, I had seen the movie Southland Tales somewhat recently and a scene in that movie took place in that bookstore, so I thought it would be fun.  Really, the trip to Venice was quite unremarkable.  Mike was not very impressed.  I personally love Venice Beach and consider it one of the coolest little areas in the United States. 

And we went to that Bar Marmont Friday night after seeing the Dr. Seuss movie.  But the first visit had its own set of restrictions: I was living with Brett, and we didn’t hang out very much at my apartment.

For the second visit, Mike came in when I was unemployed, and so I had all the time in the world to hang out.  No rushing around during rush hour, no explicit need of getting to bed at a reasonable hour.  This time I believe he came in on May 21, a Wednesday, and left on a Sunday (though last time had been a Saturday).  I don’t remember the early times.  We went to a Dodgers game one night.  Maybe he came on Tuesday, May 20^th.  I feel like that must have been the case.  We met up in Westwood because he was staying at the W hotel there, and we had a couple beers at this sports bar there that was very crowded.  I remember seeing a guy wearing an NYU t-shirt and pointing him out to Mike.  I think we didn’t go anywhere for dinner that night.  I think I went that entire day only eating an order of mozzarella sticks.  I was impressed by myself that I wasn’t hungry.

The next day, Wednesday, we went to a Los Angeles Dodgers game.  Mike bought a Matt Kemp jersey for his girlfriend.  When we looked for a spot in their parking lot, the attendant told us we didn’t want to park in general parking, and said for an extra little tip or something he would let us park in preferred parking, less the total usual price of parking there.  We thought that was very funny and took advantage of the offer.  Afterward we went to Acapulco, a Mexican chain restaurant with a location in Silverlake.

The next day we went to Magic Mountain, and I played the album Hypermagic Mountain by Lightning Bolt in the car.  We came to the song “Magic Mountain” itself as we pulled into the parking lot there.  The whole day there was great, as well.  In terms of waiting in lines, at least.  We had decided to go on that Thursday even though the new X2 roller coaster would be opening on Saturday.  We decided it was more important to spend less time in line than ride new coasters. 

Well, the inevitable has just occurred and this online menace has just replied to my post previously alluded to.  I am so sick of her you don’t even want to know.  She wrote, “Let's get this out of the way. I don't respect you. You have done nothing to earn my respect as a writer. You always invoke excuses or the other as reasons for your failures. Always. Most everyone on The Speakeasy has taken their literary lumps. Those that are having success have worked for YEARS to get where they are. They have REVISED extensively. They have earned my respect because I now share a kinship with them. We have faced all our excuses, all of our insecurities, we have been nearly wrecked by not just a handful of rejections but dozens, maybe even hundreds of them. Yet we continued on. Wrote more, most definitely revised more.”

Amongst a lot of other crap she had to say about me—always going off about my “invoking the other” as an excuse for why my work hasn’t sold.  Reality check: I haven’t really tried that hard to sell my work.  I’ve tried to produce it.  I wrote back to her, “Thanks!  You really know what you’re talking about, I guess.” I hope she doesn’t reply to that.  I am so sick of her always needing to have the last word.  She’s very superior acting.  No human being should act like that. 

The only bad thing that happened at Magic Mountain that day was that I had a scheduled unemployment interview for that day, and I missed the phone call.  I would later get in touch with them and be able to handle the interview, but I would later be declared ineligible for unemployment as well.  More on that later.  We rode Revolution, Tatsu, Superman: The Escape, Goliath, Colossus, the Ninja, Batman, Déjà vu, Viper, and probably a couple I am forgetting.  I don’t remember what we did that night.  I think that was the night I decided to buy an XBOX 360 so Mike and I could play a baseball game.  We drove around town after 11:00 at night and found the Virgin Megastore still open and I bought the XBOX system, a baseball and basketball game, and another controller, all for $540.00.  That was the first time I thought maybe I wasn’t spending my money in the best way. 

The next day I had my housewarming party and nobody showed up except for Sycamore and Molly.  And that was really late as it was.  They had been at a Dodgers game (with Kenny, incidentally, who had also been sent an invitation) that had a rain delay.  This was the last night I would see it rain in Los Angeles.  May 23^rd.  Ashleigh didn’t show up.  Jara didn’t show up.  Erin and Nathaniel didn’t show up—I think one of them was out of town.  They all had convenient excuses, and I believed them all, but I realized that night that it was just hard to have a party in L.A. unless you really knew a lot of people.

Mike spent one more day there with me and I don’t remember what we did on Saturday at all—probably just played more baseball on my new XBOX 360.  But that night we went out to Bar Marmont again, and this time I had to pay $20 for valet parking across the street because it was so bad there on a Saturday night.  We had a relatively good time there our second time.  I remember one guy coming up to Mike and telling him he looked like the best friend character from Boy Meets World.